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Erasing Signatures From History

English teacher Thom Williams encouraged students at Marple Newtown High School in Pennsylvania to write on the walls. But the teacher died recently, and now the school plans to repaint and renovate the classroom.
Ryan Collerd for The Wall Street Journal

By

Jeffrey Zaslow

Updated March 2, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

In his 35 years as a high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia, Thom Williams often encouraged his students to splash their most creative thoughts on the walls of his classroom.

Hundreds of students embraced his invitation, covering those painted cinderblocks with original art, quotes from favorite books, and deep thoughts born from teenaged angst.

It is a human impulse to want to sign our names or scribble comments on the walls of places that have meaning for us. But what happens when those walls need to come down?

"I looked to those walls for inspiration," says 18-year-old Lauren Silvestri, a student of Mr. Williams's at Marple Newtown High School in Newtown Square, Pa. Before graduating last year, she signed her name and a quote she loves. "It felt good to know I'd come back someday and my words on the wall would be there."

Her words won't remain for long, however. Mr. Williams died of cancer in December at age 63, and now the school is being renovated. That classroom's walls are set to be demolished or painted over. "Thom was a free spirit who encouraged his students to be free spirits," says
Raymond McFall,
the school's principal. Still, "I can't have everybody painting on the walls of the school."

It is a human impulse to want to sign our names or scribble comments on the walls of places that have meaning for us—from the Berlin Wall to the walls of Graceland to the paneling in favorite bars. By tradition, actors sign their names backstage in theaters where they've performed. Soldiers scratch their marks in barracks before heading overseas. Athletes scribble their names and jersey numbers in clubhouses.

These messages left behind can feel sacred. Especially in our digital age, when signing someone's Facebook "wall" feels so transitory, there's something alluring about markings with more permanence. But what happens when the buildings that house old autographs must be razed, or new owners want the walls painted over, or school principals worry about the fine line between creativity and graffiti?

The Writing on the Walls

In his 35 years as an English teacher at Marple Newtown High School, Thom Williams encouraged hundreds of students to write on the walls of his classroom, shown here. Mr. Williams died recently, and now the school in Newtown Square, Pa., is being renovated. The walls are coming down. Ryan Collerd for The Wall Street Journal

It's a delicate question, and many people these days are answering it passionately—by rallying to save the signatures.

About 2,000 people signed the walls of the Italian House Restaurant in Janesville, Wis., over the past quarter-century. But in 2008, the restaurant announced it was relocating to a building with more glass than solid walls. After word spread that the signatures would be thrown away, radio hosts in Janesville took to the airwaves to strategize with listeners about ways to retain them. Suggestions included laminating the 35 fake-brick panels of signatures onto tabletops at the new restaurant.

"I saw that people felt an emotional bond with those walls," says Edmund Halabi, the restaurant's owner, who found space to display 600 signatures at his new location.

In the building that housed the Air Force ROTC at the University of Texas at Austin, visiting former prisoners of war from World War II and the Vietnam War were asked to sign a special wall on the third floor. Last year, after the building was scheduled to be demolished, ROTC cadets vowed to save the signatures. That required slicing a 900-pound chunk of the exterior wall, and using a crane to maneuver the slab three stories to the ground. It will be imbedded in the drywall of the new ROTC building.

"Preserving the autographs is part of our promise to all former POWs and those missing in action," says Col.
Christopher Bowman,
the unit's commanding officer. "We won't forget them."

Civil War soldiers often signed their names at mustering sites before heading off to fight. Countless signatures have been painted over. But on a plaster wall at the courthouse in Gates County, N.C., you can still see signatures dated June 12, 1861. One signer was 18-year-old John Gatling, who survived the war and returned to the courthouse in 1915, at age 72, to speak at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the war's conclusion.

"Those signatures are a momentary record, captured in time," says
Josh Howard,
research historian with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. "If you touch their names, you're literally touching history."

Some preservationists have come to see graffiti as a reminder of the human spirit. At New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 82-foot-long Egyptian Temple of Dendur dates to 15 B.C. From 10 B.C. to the mid-1800s, about 100 people—Arab passersby, British explorers, Italian tourists—carved their names on the temple.

"We can't take it off. It's part of the temple's history," says
Dorothea Arnold,
chairwoman of the Met's Department of Egyptian Art.

People who sign their names—whether at ancient temples or in wet cement on their back patios—are looking for a measure of immortality. But they can't assume their signatures will outlast them.

Joey Lawrence, 76, is now facing this reality.

Starting in 1965, Mr. Lawrence asked every person who entered his home in Hampton, Va., to sign the white-plaster wall in his sitting room. A retired shipyard supervisor, he has collected more than 1,000 signatures—from friends, TV repairmen, plumbers, even Jehovah's Witnesses who knocked on his door. "Some were friends who are now dead, and others were just here for a moment, like the postman or newspaper boy. But all of them were part of my life," he says.

When pro athletes came to town for appearances, Mr. Lawrence would show up and ask them to drive to his house and sign. Some agreed to do it, including baseball stars Brooks Robinson in 1982 and Bob Feller in 1986.

Neighborhood kids would stop by asking to add their names. Some have returned decades later to revisit their signatures.

As Mr. Lawrence ages, he's aware that someday he'll die and the house will be sold. He may instruct his heirs to lower the asking price if buyers agree to keep the signatures.

Mr. Williams, the English teacher who died, knew his students' heartfelt wall musings would not last forever. He had arrived at the school in 1974 as a bearded, long-haired 27-year-old, helping kids find meaning in Shakespeare and the Beatles. He taught them haiku—the perfect short poetry for wall graffiti.

Inspired, 600 of his students filled his walls with Hamlet soliloquies, Beatles lyrics and their own haiku.

On his last day as a teacher, much older, with a white beard, Mr. Williams finally signed the wall himself. "Go to your destiny," he wrote. "Goodbye."

Since his death, former students have made a pilgrimage to the classroom to visit their markings and pay their respects. They say that room was their sanctuary.

In 2007, her senior year, Laura Kopervos had scrawled an Albert Camus quote under a window in the classroom: "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

She'd often look out that window on ugly winter days, contemplating those words. Understandably, she's sorry that her quote may soon be gone. "But it's OK," she says. "If it's painted over, I'm going to write it somewhere else."